Police pull over more than 50,000 drivers on a typical day, more than 20 million motorists every year. Yet the most common police interaction — the traffic stop — has not been tracked, at least not in any systematic way.
The Open Policing Project has collected over 200 million records of traffic stop and search data from across the country. The project has found significant racial disparities in policing. When they applied statistical tests they find that police require less suspicion to search black and Hispanic drivers than white drivers. This double standard (stopping and charging is evidence of discrimination.
Los Angeles is overhauling its traffic policing, aiming to stop pulling over cars — frequently with Black drivers — for trivial infractions like broken taillights or expired tags as a pretext to search for drugs or guns.
Los Angeles last month became the biggest city to restrict the policing of minor violations. Elsewhere across the country, a half-dozen prosecutors have said they will not bring charges based on evidence collected at these stops.
Minor stops not only disproportionately snare Black drivers but also do little to combat serious crime or improve public safety, and some escalate into avoidable violence, even killing officers or drivers.
The latest example is the death in Grand Rapids, Mich., of Patrick Lyoya, an unarmed 26-year-old Black man who was pulled over for a mismatched license plate and, after a brief struggle, was apparently shot in the head from behind.
If you are Black and get pulled over — whether it’s a moving violation, or pretextual, or whatever — you may end up dead.
Police chiefs and criminologists say the rule changes amount to the first major reconsideration of traffic policing since the early 1980s, with a shift toward more proactive policing and the advent of squad car computers for checking driver records helped make pretextual stops a cornerstone of enforcement.
A New York Times investigation last fall revealed that in the previous five years police officers pulling over cars had killed more than 400 motorists who were neither wielding a gun or knife nor under pursuit for a violent crime — a rate of more than one a week.
Legislation limiting stops in Pittsburgh quoted The Times’s reporting, and advocates across the country have cited it to argue for the changes. The killings at traffic stops are among a total of about 1,000 a year by American police, data shows.
Some police unions and officers are fighting the new rules, arguing that pulling over cars to search them is an essential weapon against serious crime.
In Los Angeles, the police union is running online advertisements warning that discouraging stops could allow guns and killers to remain on the roads.
Defenders of pretextual stops also note that the Supreme Court unanimously upheld the tactic a quarter-century ago.
An uptick in crime has stalled many criminal justice reform efforts, including at the federal level, the rethinking of traffic policing is striking. It is coming at the very moment that the pendulum feels like it’s moving back toward concern about increases in street crime.
Remember when a Cadillac with a Black man behind the wheel was a magnet for the Philadelphia police, Black men are still pulled over with other cars.
Getting pulled over consistently like that is just a rite of passage for people of color.
For a Black person, the stop itself becomes the dangerous moment.
Also, pulling over cars results in more officer fatalities than any other activity initiated by the police, even if the risk is low at any given stop.
Using cameras to police red-light violations and other infractions at some intersections makes sense. State agencies could bill by mail for an expired registration, for example, Police could quit stopping bicyclists for helmet violations.
In Los Angeles, a 2020 report from the police department’s inspector general showing that officers disproportionately stopped Black and Hispanic drivers, often for minor or technical violations.
So the department now requires that officers record themselves on their body-worn cameras stating the underlying reasons for a minor stop, a policy Chief Moore said was intended to reduce arbitrary pull-overs and build trust in the police.
An officer might explain to a driver, for example, that the car not only is missing a license plate, but also matches the description of a vehicle linked to a more serious crime.
Source: New York Times and the Stanford Open Policing Project
